faderift | SUNBLIND

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SUNBLIND | Open.

WHO: Alan Fane, Wren Coupe, Melys + YOU
WHAT: Catchall for my dudes this month.
WHEN: Throughout Justinian.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: Probably language.

[ hit me up on plurk or discord (oeste #8807) if you'd like a specific starter/need anything ❤ ]

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Technically (not actually technically, there are real papers and names and signatures, this isn't some abstract concept it's a real thing) Yngvi does report to a person. More than one. But Yngvi would rather not of late given recent-recentness so instead he does his usual routine around the Gallows because one dwarf looks much like another dwarf and thus a dwarf is easily overlooked after all.

Another jaunt into Darktown to see the family because people really don't want the family coming to see him, they really don't--

"Where you been," he says as he swings himself in all casual and misses by not a country mile but a city boy's yard and covers with some shuffling of his coat. As if he hasn't just resurfaced himself.

She peels her face from her hands to stare up at him, still folded out over her knees on the floor. Wren cuts a picture of solemn dignity — or, well. Solemn dignity's deadbeat cousin. Speaking of deadbeats, or at least those who might be mistaken so by the unwary:

"Yngvi," Something at the back of her brain finally supplies, connects dwarf to filth to friend, "Ah. This... this Chantry business."

She flaps a hand, more boneless than dismissive. There's a stack of papers on the desk: Files, and letters, and a terribly official seal. None of them look to have been touched.

(After this. Just a short break, she just needs to sit a while. It can all run on without her for a few hours — for — however long it is now,)

But he ought to know about that, shouldn’t he? He’s been gone too; she’d looked for him, upon their return, had been troubled for his absence. Had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that someone would tell her if he’d been fished from the docks.

By the time that absence began to stretch, she’d rather lost track of it.

A stab of guilt. But he’s alive, and at first glance whole, and that’s a relief. Wren moves to stand, braces herself against the table, sends its contents wobbling. Her face is doing something; it's tough to say what.

"Let me have a look at you," Briskly, for someone who looks about ready to melt into the gutter herself. "Still have all your fingers? Toes?"

Well this is familiar in a way he wouldn't expect from her. Swap her room for the stone steps and this was him, freshly washed by neat little elven hands.

"Chantry business is a harsh mistress," Yngvi knows a small portion of it. A portion that would make him worry if he were the type to worry but no of course he doesn't because he's Carta and Carta don't, they're not cut from that cloth or dirt (not stone, never stone.) "Grinds slow but fine, merchant grade."

He's saying those words for the sake of them and not the more obvious ones he's said to others who look a bit like her. They'd done the asking. Or demanding. Didn't they? Sometimes he's not sure if he's really remembering it right when he's told the story half a hundred times but there's always a vein to tap, eyes looking elsewhere when required. Folks that understand.

Rare.

"As if I'd misplace anything that isn't my trousers and if I'm misplacing my trousers it isn't my fault and it's on purpose." You can hold two truths and two lies all at the same time if you're good enough, old Carta saying. "Still got your eyes in there? Nothing come to slurp them out, swap 'em with some buttons or shiny stones?"

Buttons for indigo, isn’t that clever. She rubs at a temple, leans back against the desk. It counts as standing, so long as what you're standing on isn't formality.

"Liable to misplace something if you ever put your hands in those pockets." Maker only knows what's in them after so long away. "I am preserving my vision, the better to regard this beautiful city."

Dry as bone. Or it. Should be. Shit. There's something in her throat, what's happening, this doesn't happen. She swallows, and then — warily, as if deeply suspicious of her own voice —

"Seen much of it lately?"

Last time a person this tall did that it was Asher before the coughing starting. Before whatever had slipped into him when the rage demon had burned his flesh had settled somewhere in his blood. Yngvi makes himself laugh, pats his pockets like a showman - nothing exciting in them today except the notes kept closest to his skin for safety.

"Only things what'd bite are deepstalkers and all the ones I've seen are too big to go fitting in there comfortably, bit of a squeeze, lot of complaining, dragging me along the ground by my coat. 'Sides, they're ours anyway, no point." Not so convinced about the last part, a bit far away of a thought because...well he thought. He's been away. Doesn't know who he can really go asking about it but that's not actually why he darkened her door.

(Or did he. Wren would hardly be a discreet sort of person to have with him with that height, the things about her that anyone worth their salt in the low-to-undercity can sniff out without so much as a twitch of the head but...maybe he misses having someone else around.)

"Don't tell me the bards got to you too, there's an embargo, only meant to be whatever works for the Inquisition doing Inquisition work, not meant to be selling that line to you. Need to fight it. Give me a nod when you see 'em. I'll sort it, don't you worry." The words keep going as he waits for the cough to come, waits for a rattle in the throat the way he kept waiting in a tent that got smaller and smaller, tighter around his head until there were days when he was the one that couldn't breathe.

"Family dinners, last for days when you've got relatives over and above and on top of one another like mine, had to come up for air some time or they'd be dividing my stuff out, giving my room away. Had to wriggle free, grease myself up like a nug. A lot stayed the same, just...weird little bits changed. Or they're changing." He pulls a face, he doesn't know if they've really changed or if he's changed the more he thinks about it. Doesn't know how he feels about it or how he's meant to feel about it either.

Never should've come back here is usually top of the list of thoughts when those feelings come up.

There are people out there with happy families. Wren knows. She knows this in the same way she knows that Par Vollen exists, that all dragons are female, that drinking salt water will kill you faster than thirst. All these things she hasn't seen; has no choice but to believe.

The way that she knows those people — the ones with happy families — they aren't Carta.

"You would not prefer the deepstalkers?"

She’s farther than ever from her own blood here, and she can still feel her mother’s jaws snap from behind. Another reason not to sleep.

"Change," Or perhaps what hasn't. If it's selling lines they're speaking of, he's doing less of it than she's used to. She can't decide whether that should be concerning. Wren resists the urge to shut her eyes, "Under that embargo?"

Whatever works for the Inquisition, and he's made little secret of his feelings on that. He's still done it. There's duty bound up in this as much as anything, but it's owed six different directions: Family, Inquisition, Company —

— They need his work. But where does necessity end? A long, steadying breath. Count: One, two, three,

No such thing as a happy family but the one you make yourself and even that one snaps and snarls and doesn't say things until people are dead, hurling words into the wind. If he could, if he didn't have some shred of - not honour but something that maybe would like to edge into it, a thing that would maybe like to be in the shadow of decent, the ill-begotten cousin - then he'd go. But he cares.

He'd take a bear trap to the jugular sooner than his family finding that out. Sooner than any of them ever saying it.

"You seen a deepstalker lately? Got an ill-favoured look about them, need to see the sun some. Too big for themselves by far this far from Orzammar and the Deep Roads, biting the wrong hands, sad, really." Is he talking about deepstalkers now? Given how Yngvi tends to talk to and about his nugs, perhaps he might be considering some sort of feral deepstalker adoption process for the purposes of spying for work if he can. Or it's just Kirkwall being Kirkwall.

Where's the person with his line, the lights are shining on him and it's opening night, the audience is here and he's freezing. Winter ice rotting right through, opened up to swallow him as his throat sticks together to get the words out. "Well," and that's what every idiot says when it should just be punctuation, breathing space, an interruption in the usual spiel, "the Carta gets its cut don't it. I'm getting three wages this way. People'd sell an arm and a leg and inside bits for even one of them three. Not the Inquisition one, the other two, that's a stipend, should be ashamed to call that a wage."

Oh, he rakes it in, sure. If he says so. But where does all that money go?

There's a reason that everyone eats nugs: Nugs themselves will eat anything. You can feed them on grass or garbage and still come out with enough meat for a stew. And even keeping a good drunk in his cups, well, that's the whole point of a stipend, isn't it?

He's not in this for the money; there are easier ways to make it. If worst came to it, she's seen enough of Gwen to know she'd never see him on the street. No, Yngvi is loyal. An ugly trait, an inconvenient one in his line of work. It's certainly never been any help to hers. Lamprey teeth, they don't care what they latch onto, don't give a damn if it's only another one of their own.

The trouble of drawing three wages is that it gives you three masters. She wants to ask, is a little afraid to, which mouth bites hardest; which jaws might yet be prised free. There's no one that she trusts here: Not Arnault, not Thorne, none of her dead boys. Yngvi, somehow, blurs the shape.

She doesn't have the friends to lose.

"Three obligations," If she speaks slowly it's not for dramatic effect. The words shouldn't be this slippery, but right now she's trying hard to keep ahold of them, to say it right. Say it calm. Say it without a throat full of this — this foreign intemperance. This thing that's crawled up through her veins in the song's absence. "And you've only two hands."

Wren stoops up wobbily to check the door. It’s mostly an excuse to look away. But he's paused in the way that she's trying not to, and fuck if either of them is going to voice this directly. Double fuck if she's going to voice it with anyone listening.

"They gave me two beds," A short gesture. This is a non sequitur; It isn't. "Maker knows why. They're never going to stick anyone else in here."

Acquiring a reputation comes with certain advantages, privacy chief among them.

Yngvi's got enough coin to know that there are two faces, same as he was taught as a child where you can hold two opposite ideas in your heart at the same time. That loyalty is a thing to be sneered at because it's the knife you don't see coming up between your ribs but the thing expected of you to your family that raised you, that gave everything to you and not to someone else. (The Carta gets its cut, just depends who does the cutting, and when, and where.)

"So it goes, father, bride, and well it's Kirkwall, sometimes your mother is your sister and your sister your mother." Yngvi's got it in him to be malicious with others or to make it sound that way because even small dogs sound angry when their get their hackles up and start snarling but why would he here? He's too young to be in his bones tired (forget that he doesn't actually know how old he is) but here he is. Still good enough at the bit to make it look like he's playing along because if he has to catch her-- well he won't because look at her and look at him but he'd try.

It's more than most anyone else would ever get in this world.

"What will the neighbours think?" It takes a while to work that out of his throat. To ignore how his voice cracks not because of stupid drunk confessions to his lady driven by because she gets it and doesn't pity me like a sad sack but because what will the neighbours think when that actually does have to be a concern and if this is the world where Yngvi is being the thinking one--

He's tired.

He would probably like to sleep. To know that he could sleep without someone going through his things. Or knifing him. Or waking up elsewhere. Prodigal sons returning is a vastly overrated genre.

"I am Orlesian. There will always be a rumour."

He's right, though. He's right, however much it sounds he doesn't want to be. Her pupose here is as much a public face as it is a listening ear; that she's allowed appearances to slip this far already —

It matters not, She'd like to say. I am done with this,

But she isn't. She won't be, not until she's done, and that's not anything that she knows how to say aloud. Not in any way that isn't selfish. Foolish. Frightening.

The Carta would be seen as angling for influence, in one manner or another; the lyrium connection (personal, industrial), or a more lurid little scandal. That the Chantry has its dealings isn't exactly a secret. And yet, how outré, to dismiss with the good manners of go-betweens and moral sanctimony. A perfectly legitimate merchant or two might even have cause to grow concerned,

Thorn would be fucking livid, and she’d be right to. Wren grits her jaw. She isn’t thinking. It's all slow and heavy with the weight of overfeeling. She knows where that momentum leads, and it still refuses to be said.

It matters not what they think. I do not plan to hear it,

"The quartermaster from Skyhold," He must still loathe the both of them. Would love a chance at some petty revenge. "Close, to my knowledge, with ours here."

A shrug. She slumps back against the wall. It might shift the onus of obligation, at least, and it's a misstep she can afford the appearance of.

"To plant the idea, not terribly difficult."

If she keeps her shit together. If she bothers to get her shit together.

Edited 2017-06-17 00:03 (UTC)

"This isn't throwing a beignet and calling it a bon mot in a patis-- cake shop."

Look at him, he can be Orlesian if he needs to or just about, bad pronunciation and still clinging to not knowing what a pâtisserie is because he wants to be stubborn about it.

The thing is, Yngvi's always been able to be whatever he needs to be because a child is an investment that's as cold as it gets when you're having to balance the books and not every child is precious. Away from Orzammar, away from the Taint, up where food is richer and more plentiful and likely to have things like real vegetables there are more babies than dwarves would prefer and he's said as much in different words to her. A very cerain set of skills taught to one dwarf blessed with a face less hewn from the rock and more carefully chiselled out. Be what you need to be to get it done and no one will be angry with you for once Yngvi.

He steps a little more into her personal space, peers up and wonders if he should set a hand on her. That's what people do usually. He's seen it. But the rules are different when there's a human and not-a-human so he hovers and makes it look like he's fixing something near the table and it's painfully awkward.

(You know who's young? Yngvi.)

"Course they are, got nothing better to do. Comparing notes on who might be stealing the jam and who they think sneaks off in the night for a shag." No his voice is absolutely level right there and he's not having issues deciding where his eyes are meant to look.

"I'm charming. Everyone knows that."

Please remember that because he knows the memories of Templars go and he doesn't know if he can juggle that and watching over his lady and reporting to the Inquisition and the Carta and the Boneflayers and his own stupid brain that for some reason doesn't seem to want to shut up these days in different ways to how it was noisy in the past.

He catches himself and she throws him a look; sidelong and down, and Maker, he’s close now. What the fuck is he doing with his hands.

"It is settled, then. You may be charming here when you wish." Tired, but there’s no commitment to the exasperation in it. "I will see to the arrangements later."

The operative word being later. Too easy to push an argument too far right now, too easy to play her hand. Pissing off quartermasters (to say nothing of one's boss) is a task to be undertaken with care. At least the latter may be placated by distance.

After a moment, Wren reaches down, thumps a heavy palm to his shoulder. There. There, there.

Offering comfort has never really been her forte; with a foot and a half between them, with the empty ranks she's left burnt behind her, that prospect only grows more fumbling. Alien. Probably it would be better to be on his eye level for this — probably that would result in a short trip to the floor.

"This will not get better. Not for everyone." Many. Most. He’s due a certain honesty. Wren considers him: Under the scruff, the dirt, he can’t be much older than Gwenaelle, if that. Yet far different ages for it. "But I know that this, the way things are, they will not last."

Change is so often unpleasant; it's still change. Her grip tightens, pulls away. It's all the rousing speech she can stand to give right now, and sincere or not, she guesses it's about all either of them would stomach.

It's called remembering that he's a dwarf and she's a Templar and that they're both in Kirkwall where he can't do as he pleases like he's gotten used to doing for the most since skipping out all those years ago. (You don't feel young when you run away, when there's a man saying 'get your things and come with me' you don't feel young if it's the escape you don't dream of because you're a dwarf and dwarves don't dream.

Says a lot about this world. Everyone else dreams but dwarves? Dwarves don't. Stay in your place, always be the good stout folk they expect you to be. No one bats an eye about asking things from a dwarf in the grand scheme really, they don't second guess like they would a qunari or an elf or a mage.)

"Your door might end up with teeth then, just mind yourself." This door isn't safe enough. Well, nothing's safe enough but if Yngvi can put enough traps and measures in place to slow people down or give him time to hear them cursing and howling that'll be enough. So he pretends to wobble because Wren is absurdly tall and he's not, Wren's had decent meals for most of her life (probably, he feels safe in that assumption) and his hand goes on top of hers for a moment.

Just to get his balance you understand. To get that cocky little smirk back.

Twisted up and too tight all wrapped around his throat, knotted up through his time and right back out and around his spine but he can sort of manage it. It's what he's been thinking when he's not been sleeping, when he's been bitter and drunk and slumped in corners or attempting to find doorsteps where people will overlook a bundle of rags as being perhaps a resting despair demon and not worth the trouble to deal with it at this hour. (Yngvi is worse than the demon.) "Yeah. S'just...taking a long time. Longer than s'fair for some people who've had it a lot harder than the louder ones but they'll just do what everyone does if you don't watch. Especially here. This place is where you're always walking over someone's back." His voice is young (he doesn't know how old he is did he tell her that one or not but he can hazard a guess from bits he doesn't remember and counting back) but he's trying.

But it's appreciated and he'll try not to get himself gutted doing his whole thing in Darktown for her sake and his lady's.

The corner of her mouth tugs aside as his hand folds over hers. The expression that people make when they know they ought to smile, and can't.

He's older, harder than his years — and somehow, almost more naive. To still be hurt by the fact of hurting another; by the world's vast indifference to it all. Is that what compassion is now, naïveté?

He's trying. It matters. She wants terribly to still believe that any of this is going to, that at the end of the day they will have been worth something, the people who tried. Who didn't just shout, but listen. He's older than perhaps he ought to be, but his voice is young (is that what youth is now, vulnerability?), and she tries to think of what Courwin would have said. The things he would've told her; the things she should have told the others,

Much good it did any of them.

"It would be easier, would it not?" Softly, because if he’s due honesty, he’s due kindness too, and there’d be none in repeating what they both know: Nothing’s fair. "To never look down."

She shakes her head. The world doesn’t need more blindness, the world will have it all the same.

"A good way to step in horseshit."

Or a bear trap. Mind yourself — This is precisely the sort of reason she’d first been so insistent upon a private room. Funny how it all comes around.

"Please, ah, tell me what you install." And tries not to shift her tone as she adds, "Or if you’ve cause to move the furniture."

What of it there is. Two untouched beds, a desk, a chair, the armor rack — the current chaos of papers aside, the room is spare, tidy; without concessions to decor. The product of necessity as much as habit.

"I... prefer to know where things are."

The same place, every time, until it’s more habit than memory. It makes the mornings easier, the nights. The days, if they’re bad ones.

They’re usually better than this.

There's a story taught in the dark where the dark is cold and damp, getting into your bones and lungs but it's your dark and you know it so even if it's full of knives and worse it isn't the same dark that someone else (softer, gentler, walking up above your head) uses to frighten their child at bedtime or during chores or as an object lesson sitting down on an uncomfortable seat because that way they'll pay attention. There's a story and there are siblings, doesn't matter what they are just that they're siblings, that's the important bit, and one sibling gets caught in a rope out at the docks and the other one ties it to themselves to haul them back in. They both drown. Their names were sentiment and hope.

There aren't glimmers of goodness in their children because that's foolish and foolish gets you killed. Unless it just happens. Yngvi could blame it on other people but he can't be the only one who looks at the world and wants to scream and cry at it. Why do drunk men and women pound their hands against the dirt until their knuckles are raw? They know. They know it's unfair but it's the only time that they can and the world won't look at them like they're that sort of fool.

Wren is here and Wren hasn't shrugged him aside, hasn't-- hasn't used him like the rest, hasn't said anything about him getting things that she knows he could get, has played all the word games and you can't be a Templar without having some place to go in yourself, or he thinks, where nothing touches because how else do you last? Or is that what's happening to her now. Maybe she's built up a citadel and the foundations are cracking, maybe that's what happens in the end. But Wren's done right by him and that...it's so rare.

"I get a crick in my neck looking up, not going to fix that looking straight ahead am I?" That's a very dangerous sort of almost confession a guard would cuff him hard round the face for, only ending up with blood on the stone for their troubles.

Still he has to consider. "Well. Me. The garrison," so the main four nugs that tend to be in attendance, "can't hang stuff when you're that tall, I'll draw something up, s'not like I need time to do all that dreaming weirdness anyway, just me and some furs and some papers."

(Basically just rolls himself up in the furs, you could roll him down the hall if you so desired.)

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